The acquisition of houses by the National Trust from the 1930s had less to do with the impoverishment of aristocratic families than the industrial wealth of bachelor donors, as Michael Hall reveals

There’s no shortage of great picks at this year’s TEFAF Maastricht, the Netherlands, including a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, a pastel portrait by Dora Maar and two sections of 4th-century Roman mosaics

So Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in October 1876, charting the latest instalment of the Holbein cult. He was renting a room in Isleworth, west London, still hoping for a religious career

• In March, Marthe Armitage will be 96 ...

For antiques dealer Val Foster and her husband Philip, part of the attraction of moving south from Nottinghamshire some five years ago was the prospect of making a new home. ‘We’d found a property whi

Originally built in 1703, as the London home of the Duke of Buckingham, Buckingham House was acquired by the newly married King George III in 1761, as an escape from the nearby St James’s Palace, the